Curiously, I question how one can trust participation when the citizenship of a voter cannot be verified and that lack of verification is driven by the status quo election rules that Phil wants to keep “stable”. How he intends to protect representation, if citizenship cannot be verified, is yet to be defined.
“The other path is the one Washington is increasingly taking: making it harder to vote, narrowing representation”.
“Making it harder to vote” [for illegal aliens and those who are denied the right],” narrowing representation” is that like gerrymandering Virginia into a Democrat demesne?
“… even a small minority willing to act violently can-do enormous damage.
This is why current Republican efforts on voting are so troubling.” Wait, wait. Who is the “small minority willing to act violently “ against the other party? Just who is doing the shooting? The large majority are not from the right.
“President Trump and House Republicans are pushing national election changes that would require documentary proof of citizenship, tighten voter ID rules, restrict mail voting, and ban ranked-choice voting in places that use it now. “ “… critics warn that these rules would hit young, elderly, poor, and minority voters the hardest while creating fresh confusion right before the 2026 midterms.”
Critics are not saying how the rules would “hit” all of those citizens, “just trust us, they would”. The same people that have to identify themselves as citizens to get Medicaid, SNAP, universal driver’s license, any other public assistance, are somehow not capable of identifying themselves to vote and will be confused on how to vote because, they ID themselves?? Pull the other finger!
“They tell millions of Americans that one side is willing to rewrite the rules before the votes are cast.”
Curiously, you’re not saying that about the gerrymandering of Virginia, in this article.
“ If the administration, congressional Republicans, and the Supreme Court keep making participation narrower, representation weaker, and democratic[sic] trust more fragile, they will be worsening exactly the problem they claim to fear.”
“participation narrower” translation: stopping illegal voting and fraud.
Republicans can trust the Democrats. Just remember that, the next time you read about hundreds of thousands of ineligible voters on the roles and your vote means nothing because the Democrats gerrymandered you right out of the system. Yes, you can trust them and if you do, you are a fool.
Raconteur, thanks for engaging seriously with the question. You’re absolutely right that there have been significant attacks from the left in recent years, and those need to be condemned without hesitation. The data I’m looking at, compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies from 30 years of U.S. incidents, make that clear: for most of the period since the mid‑1990s there were essentially no left‑wing terrorist attacks in a typical year, then the count starts to rise in the mid‑2010s and jumps sharply in 2025.
Over the same span, however, the same dataset shows right‑wing attacks occurring in many more years and often in larger numbers, with their own peak in 2025. In plain English: both sides now have violent fringes, but over time there has been more right‑aligned political violence than left‑aligned, even with the recent surge on the left.
On the voting‑rules side, I agree with you that elections need safeguards. The question is proportionality and evidence. Federal law already bans non‑citizens from voting in federal elections, and the best studies we have—not partisan spin, but large‑scale reviews of actual cases—find that proven non‑citizen voting is vanishingly rare, while very strict “proof of citizenship” rules have blocked thousands of eligible citizens who lacked the right paperwork. So when national bills tighten ID, require extra documents, restrict mail voting, and ban tools like ranked‑choice voting, they are solving a tiny problem by creating a much larger one: more eligible voters pushed out, more confusion right before a high‑stakes election, and more people convinced the rules are being rewritten for partisan gain.
You also raise Virginia’s map. Here I’ll agree with you again: Virginia’s new congressional map is highly partisan, and Democrats are now doing in blue states what Republicans have done in a number of red states. That’s part of the problem I’m trying to describe. When either party uses maps and procedural changes to squeeze the other side, it feeds the belief that politicians are choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians.
The op‑ed’s main point is not that one party is pure and the other is uniquely evil. It is that we are in a period where a small minority is willing to use violence, and the risk goes up when three things happen at once: people feel locked out of fair participation, the rules keep shifting in partisan ways, and leaders talk about politics as an existential war rather than a competition among fellow citizens. Some of the proposals now coming from the Trump administration, congressional Republicans, and the Supreme Court are moving in the direction of narrower participation and more fragile trust, not less. That is bad news no matter which team you’re on, because when the guardrails fail, the violent fringe on both sides finds it easier to convince itself that bullets, not ballots, are the only way to win.
If you’d like, I’m happy to trade sources on any of these points so we’re arguing from the same set of facts, even if we still disagree on what to do about them.
Thanks. I'd really like to see the data and sources on " very strict “proof of citizenship” rules have blocked thousands of eligible citizens who lacked the right paperwork."
I'd be happy to share my sources. Have a good day.
That’s what I mean when I say strict proof‑of‑citizenship schemes end up sidelining large numbers of eligible citizens while turning up very little actual fraud.
Looking forward to your references. Have a great day.
Here's a look at some of the major incidents of left-wing political attacks in recent years.
2017 Congressional Baseball Game Shooting
2022 Assassination Attempt on Brett Kavanaugh
2024 Luigi Mangione's alleged assassination of Brian Thompson
2024 Butler rally
2024 Florida golf course
2025 Antifa shootings at ICE facility
2025 Assassination of Charlie Kirk
2025 Attempted Assassination of Trump
2026 Attempted Assassination of Trump
“expanding trusted participation, keeping election rules stable”
Curiously, I question how one can trust participation when the citizenship of a voter cannot be verified and that lack of verification is driven by the status quo election rules that Phil wants to keep “stable”. How he intends to protect representation, if citizenship cannot be verified, is yet to be defined.
“The other path is the one Washington is increasingly taking: making it harder to vote, narrowing representation”.
“Making it harder to vote” [for illegal aliens and those who are denied the right],” narrowing representation” is that like gerrymandering Virginia into a Democrat demesne?
“… even a small minority willing to act violently can-do enormous damage.
This is why current Republican efforts on voting are so troubling.” Wait, wait. Who is the “small minority willing to act violently “ against the other party? Just who is doing the shooting? The large majority are not from the right.
“President Trump and House Republicans are pushing national election changes that would require documentary proof of citizenship, tighten voter ID rules, restrict mail voting, and ban ranked-choice voting in places that use it now. “ “… critics warn that these rules would hit young, elderly, poor, and minority voters the hardest while creating fresh confusion right before the 2026 midterms.”
Critics are not saying how the rules would “hit” all of those citizens, “just trust us, they would”. The same people that have to identify themselves as citizens to get Medicaid, SNAP, universal driver’s license, any other public assistance, are somehow not capable of identifying themselves to vote and will be confused on how to vote because, they ID themselves?? Pull the other finger!
“They tell millions of Americans that one side is willing to rewrite the rules before the votes are cast.”
Curiously, you’re not saying that about the gerrymandering of Virginia, in this article.
“ If the administration, congressional Republicans, and the Supreme Court keep making participation narrower, representation weaker, and democratic[sic] trust more fragile, they will be worsening exactly the problem they claim to fear.”
“participation narrower” translation: stopping illegal voting and fraud.
Republicans can trust the Democrats. Just remember that, the next time you read about hundreds of thousands of ineligible voters on the roles and your vote means nothing because the Democrats gerrymandered you right out of the system. Yes, you can trust them and if you do, you are a fool.
Raconteur, thanks for engaging seriously with the question. You’re absolutely right that there have been significant attacks from the left in recent years, and those need to be condemned without hesitation. The data I’m looking at, compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies from 30 years of U.S. incidents, make that clear: for most of the period since the mid‑1990s there were essentially no left‑wing terrorist attacks in a typical year, then the count starts to rise in the mid‑2010s and jumps sharply in 2025.
Over the same span, however, the same dataset shows right‑wing attacks occurring in many more years and often in larger numbers, with their own peak in 2025. In plain English: both sides now have violent fringes, but over time there has been more right‑aligned political violence than left‑aligned, even with the recent surge on the left.
On the voting‑rules side, I agree with you that elections need safeguards. The question is proportionality and evidence. Federal law already bans non‑citizens from voting in federal elections, and the best studies we have—not partisan spin, but large‑scale reviews of actual cases—find that proven non‑citizen voting is vanishingly rare, while very strict “proof of citizenship” rules have blocked thousands of eligible citizens who lacked the right paperwork. So when national bills tighten ID, require extra documents, restrict mail voting, and ban tools like ranked‑choice voting, they are solving a tiny problem by creating a much larger one: more eligible voters pushed out, more confusion right before a high‑stakes election, and more people convinced the rules are being rewritten for partisan gain.
You also raise Virginia’s map. Here I’ll agree with you again: Virginia’s new congressional map is highly partisan, and Democrats are now doing in blue states what Republicans have done in a number of red states. That’s part of the problem I’m trying to describe. When either party uses maps and procedural changes to squeeze the other side, it feeds the belief that politicians are choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians.
The op‑ed’s main point is not that one party is pure and the other is uniquely evil. It is that we are in a period where a small minority is willing to use violence, and the risk goes up when three things happen at once: people feel locked out of fair participation, the rules keep shifting in partisan ways, and leaders talk about politics as an existential war rather than a competition among fellow citizens. Some of the proposals now coming from the Trump administration, congressional Republicans, and the Supreme Court are moving in the direction of narrower participation and more fragile trust, not less. That is bad news no matter which team you’re on, because when the guardrails fail, the violent fringe on both sides finds it easier to convince itself that bullets, not ballots, are the only way to win.
If you’d like, I’m happy to trade sources on any of these points so we’re arguing from the same set of facts, even if we still disagree on what to do about them.
Thanks. I'd really like to see the data and sources on " very strict “proof of citizenship” rules have blocked thousands of eligible citizens who lacked the right paperwork."
I'd be happy to share my sources. Have a good day.
Raconteur, here are my refereces.
On proof of citizenship, the experience in Kansas and Arizona is stark.
In Kansas, a documentary‑proof law ended up blocking about 31,000 voter registration applications—roughly 12% of all new registrants—before the courts struck it down, while identifying fewer than 30 suspected non‑citizens (see the trial summary in this New York Times explainer: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/us/politics/proof-of-citizenship-voter-registration-kansas.html).
In Arizona, proof‑of‑citizenship rules have created a two‑tier system. A recent analysis finds that as many as 258,000 voters—about 6.3% of the electorate—are blocked from state and local elections because they haven’t provided the extra paperwork, even though there’s no evidence that any meaningful share of them are non‑citizens (ResponsiveGov, “The SAVE Act: How a Proof of Citizenship Requirement Would Impact Elections”: https://responsivegov.org/research/the-save-act-how-a-proof-of-citizenship-requirement-would-impact-elections/). On top of that, Arizona now has about 35,000 “federal‑only” voters, who can vote for president and Congress but are shut out of state races because of these rules (Votebeat: https://www.votebeat.org/arizona/2025/02/25/voter-proof-of-citizenship-laws-blocked-by-9th-circuit/).
That’s what I mean when I say strict proof‑of‑citizenship schemes end up sidelining large numbers of eligible citizens while turning up very little actual fraud.
Looking forward to your references. Have a great day.